We’re re-emerging above decks, blinking in the sunlight, thankful to have survived

Friends celebrate the end of lockdown 6.0 in Lygon Street. Carlton, in Melbourne. Picture : NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

And so it is that the coronavirus has been stemmed and staunched by the will of the great majority of Australian people to embrace vaccination. Tentatively, we’re regaining freedoms lost. There is hope and expectation that things will improve. For the moment, though, we’re focused on coming out of lockdown and reconnecting with family and friends interstate and overseas.

Some talk of getting back to normal, which I think sets the wrong tone. It’s like we’ve been battened down as a nation in order to safely navigate the turbulent corona seas. Now the turbulence has passed we’re re-emerging above decks, blinking in the sunlight, thankful to have survived and appreciative that our battered boat Australia is still seaworthy and going forward.

Then comes the realisation that not only have we changed course, we have changed as a people. We’re warier of our geopolitical situation. We’re focused on developing local manufacturing capacity. We’ve been quietly making plans and investing in alliances.

There’s grainy black and white vision of a man dancing in Melbourne’s Swanston St on VJ Day, August 15, 1945. That dancing-man clip captures a public display of joyousness that can only follow a prolonged period of community pain. In the 1920s, those who survived the horrors of the Great War went on to celebrate the essence of life with the energetic Charleston dance. What agility that dance demands! We too need a dance. We need a post-corona-celebration-of-life dance. And if it’s not a dance then we need a shift in fashion, the invention of a crazy new hairstyle, something to mark this moment – our moment – as kicking off a new era of prosperity and self-confidence.

It won’t take much to unleash Australian confidence in the future. Years of life-sapping drought culminating in catastrophic bushfires in the summer of 2019-20 were quelled by drought-busting summer rains. Our collective response? We connected immediately with joyous farmers dancing in the rain.

And so we come to our reopening to the world, and to the restoration of our intrinsic freedoms. Assuming no other calamity occurs over the next six months, this promises to be a time of great exhilaration. The simple restitution of the right to shop, to congregate in offices, markets and churches, to travel whenever and wherever we wish, to make long-term plans – these simple freedoms, we now understand, are the stuff of Australian life.

In the post-lockdown era we will rebuild, recreate and, yes, procreate. Young people uncertain of their future employment can postpone kids for a year or two. But now that we’re opening up, the pent-up demand is likely to result in a baby boom late next year.

There is more to this than the restitution of freedoms. It is the exhilaration of knowing it’s time to conceptualise a better version of the Australia we left behind. We should be outrageously ambitious in the 2020s. Never again should we be beholden to others to deliver critical material for our safety, security and wellbeing. We should train more young Australians in the skills required to independently sustain our way of life.

Yes, we will rebuild and recreate a better version of Australia in the decade ahead. Just as generations of farmers, of bushfire-ravaged communities, of freedom-fighting Diggers have done previously. Let our determination to rebuild a better Australia be our legacy, our gift to future generations. But for the moment let us make plans, savour reconnections, and maybe dance a dance of freedoms restored.